It has become commonplace to pair the second J’Accuse with Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, another French film made that same year in the ostensible hope of avoiding World War II. I suspect, however, that Renoir was much too canny to think that his humanistic masterpiece would have any lasting effect on the real world. Gance, on the other hand, with his delusional ambition, probably fancied he could turn the trick with the overheated intensity of his vision. In La Fin du Monde (1931), after all, he had more or less destroyed the world, although it is not clear how the film ended, and it is similarly unclear at the end of J’Accuse how summoning the dead of World War I has much impact other than scaring the pants off some Verdun cemetery workers. It is probably not fair to question Gance’s motives too closely, but it is hard to reconcile his pacifism with his veneration of the mass-murdering thug Napoleon, and the proto-fascist tendencies expressed in some of his other films. There is reason to question whether Gance ever had anything consistent or coherent to say, or whether, for him, the medium was truly the message. Much of his sound career was taken up remaking his silent successes or producing fairly conventional costume pictures like Lucrece Borgia or his last two films, Austerlitz and Cyrano and D’Artagan. (By happy accident, Gance had had the actors mouth their exact words in the filming of Napoleon, enabling him to issue an abridged sound version, Bonaparte and the Revolution, in 1934, and updated in 1971.) In his own defense, Gance, stymied by producers who feared that his costly visual innovations might catch on with the public, said, “The films I made I describe as ‘prostitution,’ not to live but so as not to die…I did not have the problem of wondering whether I was guiding the characters or being led by them. I had to respect the established structures, outside which I could not stray.”

Gance’s inventions, like Polyvision, a widescreen process that anticipated Cinerama and CinemaScope by decades, cannot be ignored, as they tended to be at the time. The critic Bernard Eisenschitz wrote that Gance’s vision posed a threat “in calmly affirming the existence of artistic techniques which render current practices obsolete and demand that they be rethought.” Or, as Tom Milne has suggested, “he was one of the greatest masters of the image in the history of the cinema, and that should count for something.”

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